low tech todo lists

About 15 months ago I wrote about how I managed my personal todo lists, via bits of paper inside my moleskine. Since then I have taken this approach and extended it to work to do lists too. It is kind of like the 43folders idea, but expressed in a different manner around task mangement.

I have a job in which I need to satisfy the needs of a range of clients and often walk from one meeting straight into the next. Usually generating reams of notes in the process, or lots of text in SubEthaEdit etc. I guess this sounds familiar ?

So, rather than bury my tasks inside the pages of my notebook, I put them on three bits of the larger post-it pad, see photo. Why three, the first two capture what I need to get done, the third is for overspill, when I have not had time to consolidate tasks from the first two. I put the post-it sheets on the inside front cover of the A5 notebook, which I use for note-making.

There is no order to the list, it is just a list of things to do, two pages keeps things to about 20 tasks, trying to subdivide these into categories is a waste of time, things are often too fluid for this to work and there are only 20 tasks. Some prioritization is useful, an asterisk usually suffices. See Paul Hammond on why more than 20 is bad.

Why does this work? It keeps a current, easily replaceable, list of things to do in a fixed location. Thus I always have to hand the next task to complete and so avoid the endless email checking; coffee-making etc distraction tasks that many of us are prone to.

There are some drawbacks, this strategy can lead to action led, short term thinking, so a background set of tasks framing what you need to do over the course of the next month is useful. A hidden advantage is that you have a list of tasks to hand for weekly reports or other audit tasks.

I've been doing this for personal tasks for about 18 months and for work for about a month or so, it works and I feel more on top of my smaller tasks. It is a very minor life hack. Try it and see how you like it, it doesn't cost much to implement.